Site Mobile Navigation

They Came in From the Cold War

In his memoir, “Man Without a Face,” Markus Wolf chronicled his 34 years directing the foreign intelligence service of East Germany’s Ministry of State Security, or Stasi. His network of spies infiltrated NATO headquarters and the West German chancellery.

The intelligence world, East and West, was a realm of moral shadows. Its practices were often unethical, its methods dirty. Given this fact, it seems to me that the C.I.A. was at a peculiar disadvantage in having to take part in a sort of democratic pantomime to satisfy the requirements of the American Constitution, regardless of whether or not they were relevant to intelligence work. No secret service can ever be democratic nor, however much politicians may wish it, open to constant scrutiny and still perform its tasks properly. In the C.I.A., much of senior officers’ time was taken up preparing documents and summaries of their work to present outside the agency, always with half an eye on the reaction of politicians and the press. ...

The C.I.A.’s miscarried attempts to unseat Fidel Castro and its haphazard tactics in Central America had brought down its reputation among conservatives and liberals alike. Assessments made by our officers in the Washington and New York stations regarding American intelligence in the 1970s and 1980s showed it to be far less respected than in the 1950s and 1960s. This, as any management consultant could have said, had an effect on the morale of its officers. The organization came to be seen not only as secretive and underhanded — quite normal judgments of a powerful intelligence service — but seedy, a reputation no intelligence service can afford. Secret services are psychologically unstable places and their internal mind-set is quickly reflected in performance. Reports on the traitor Aldrich Ames revealed a high level of self-hatred within the C.I.A. Ames not only disliked his own agency, he despised it. ...

In fact, spotting C.I.A. operatives in Bonn was ridiculously easy. Quite unlike my own insistence on careful preparation and slow, almost imperceptible approaches to a potential recruit, they always set off on a frantic round of making contacts. Targets we had planted often complained of the agents’ poor level of knowledge of the economic problems of the East, which made it hard to know what line to spin them because their basic information about the East was so sketchy. For a time in the late 1970s and 1980s the quality of the American agents was so poor and their work so haphazard that our masters began to ask fearfully whether Washington had stopped taking East Germany seriously.

In his memoir, “From the Shadows,” Robert M. Gates details his career at the Central Intelligence Agency, and especially his relationship with William J. Casey, the controversial director of the agency during the Reagan administration.

[G]etting the C.I.A. bureaucracy to do more on Soviet covert action and subversion was painfully hard and eventually took on a political edge. Only at the end of November 1981 were all C.I.A. stations finally tasked to submit a monthly report on Soviet covert action (“active measures”) in their respective countries as a way of permitting more aggressive counteroperations. And only after I became deputy director for intelligence in January 1982 did we at last establish on the analytical side an organization to study Soviet and other foreign covert actions and deception activities around the world. ...

To establish a data base of Soviet covert activities, I finally was able to persuade the deputy director for operations, John Stein, to allow a team of analysts to pore through the operational files on the U.S.S.R. ... A C.I.A. ability to monitor Soviet covert action in an organized and thorough manner was at last born — 35 years into the cold war. It was this kind of slowness and conventional thinking that exasperated — and more than occasionally infuriated — Bill Casey.

Casey complained bitterly and often graphically when the analysis he got seemed fuzzy minded, lacked concreteness, missed the point, or in his view was naïve about the real world, when it lacked “ground truth.” ...

An analyst had to be tough and have the courage of his or her convictions to challenge Casey on something he cared about and knew about. He argued, he fought, he yelled, he grumped with the analysts in person and on paper.